merry christmas!

I woke up to find the Christmas book in my e-mail inbox. I was very impressed with the number and quality of the submissions, so hopefully I won’t have too much trouble finding time to give a few of them a go.

This was a really fun model to design, and it’s actually fairly simple in structure. Just a lot of pleating, kind of like LaFosse’s alligator. Yet again, it’s pretty much from collapsing two bases, one after the other. However, when I release the CP in February, both bases will be represented in the same CP, which took forever to draw. Oripa could barely handle folding it without crashing every fifteen minutes. But I’m hoping someone who recieved the diagram in the Christmas book will give it a try and maybe post it up on the forums.

I’m assuming not a lot of people knew such a creature existed, and I sure didn’t before randomly google image searching for some subject to fold. The tail is supposed to be clamped inside of the mouth, it’s characteristic defensive pose, but my paper was a bit thick and due to a few mistakes in the paper making process I had to reduce to size of the paper. In the future I’ll fold a better one, maybe just double unryu with MC. But anyway, I’d appreciate any feeback! Happy Holidays!

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If you were wondering:

Random thought:

Oh man, it's a long one this time:

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is where the irreparably damaged, infected, useless, or cancerous cells of an animal either voluntarily or by command of surrounding tissue terminate themselves for the good of cellular society. Prior to this, they first give away their valuable, salvageable constituents to the rest of the cells before being destroyed in a clean manner so as to prevent an inflammatory response. Such processes prevent humans from having webbed feet at birth, developing tumors or diseases, etc.

If this is the way nature does it, why don't humans? Is the human tendecy to be incredibly reluctant towards the removal of certain people unnatural? In other words, does its lack of a widely used 'programmed human death' system disrupt society by allowing its destructive, wasteful, or infectious members to continue to cause problems?

It's amazing how nature can be so logical about things. Either nature intended humans to be illogical, or we're just doing something wrong.

Let's take it to an even larger scale. Humans are a part of the society of the entire biosphere, and, as a whole, our actions have undoubtedly caused serious harm to it. It isn't hard to make the argument that we act like a cancer, a destructive force that seems to be unhindered by the population controls we're faced with. Perhaps, eventually, humans will face "programmed species death" in an effort by the biosphere to save itself. Remember the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still"? (Ok, most likely not but stick with me here.) It ends with the humans facing annihilation by the other worlds of the universe, who feel threatened by the presence of our destructive and violent technologies in space.

But, our extinction by the will of the biosphere seems impractical to me. That would only quicken the destruction of the world because humans have made things so bad that we truly are the only ones who can fix it before a catastrophic collapse in the biosphere. I feel it has become our responsibility as a species to justify our continued participation in the biosphere by the collective effort of every individual of our 6.7 billion population to quickly reverse our negative global impact. Just think, 6.7 billion people. Don't you think such a feat would actually be a simple task with that kind of brainpower, willpower, manpower?

"The decision rests with you."

(P.S. - For those of you who didn't catch that reference to the previously mentioned film, for crying out loud, watch it!)

And just in case you were unaware:

This forum is a great place to visit if you want to take your origami skills to another level. Get feedback and critiques, learn new techniques, and be inspired by some of the greatest folders out there.